Thanks to a brilliant app called Brushes, budding artists across the globe are using the iPhone as a digital canvas to create incredible portraits and works of art in record time. One of the pioneers in this field is Jorge Colombo, an artist and illustrator based in New York, who creates sketches for The New Yorker and also sells prints online.

One of my favourites is this sketch he did of the famous Apollo Theatre in New York:

You can find more of his works on The New Yorker Finger Painting blog.

Most would agree that there are only a handful of successful South African Internet entrepreneurs and start-ups when compared to other parts of the world and the Internet hasn’t dramatically impacted the lives of the majority of the South African public or added much to their social upliftment.

The obvious question that popped up frequently over the course of the weekend was: “But should we care?”. There was a general consensus that we should, but for different reasons. Even the most dogmatic capitalists conceded that making money and enriching people’s lives weren’t mutually exclusive and that we all had vested interests in bringing Internet connectivity and entrepreneurship to the masses.

Some of the topics that were discussed in the interactive sessions, included policy, advocacy, skills and education, the future of mass communications, bootstrapping and funding, and online communities. There were also a number of informal “talking head” sessions whereby a participant would facilitate a brief discussion around a particular topic or theme within small groups that rotated every 15 minutes or so. These sessions proved to be very popular as they ensured that everybody had an opportunity to have their say and a lot got covered in a relatively short period of time.

A personal highlight was listening to the experiences and advice of serial entrepreneurs and South African success stories, Vinny Lingham and Gareth Knight, who both now live abroad but made a special effort to attend the event in order to support the initiative and network with like-minded South Africans. One of the pearls of wisdom that I picked up on was that as South Africans we need to be more outward looking and aim our sights at the global market as there’s no reason why a good homegrown idea can’t become a successful international business, and there are already a number of case studies to back this up.

Geek Retreat ’09 was by no means a panacea for solving South Africa’s Internet-related problems, nor did organizers Heather Ford and Justin Spratt intend it to be, but at the very least it allowed a small sample of great minds to discuss the myriad issues affecting both them and the country and to mobilize an enthusiastic team that will work towards making a positive difference.

Only time will tell to what extent it will live up to its mantra (borrowed from Openspaceworld.com):

Never before, and never again will the assembled group gather in this time and place. No one could possibly predict the synergism of effect that will take place when this particular group of people assemble.

For more on the Retreat including participants, session notes, and proposed projects go to the #geekretreat wiki.

Also read: Toby Shapshak’s Pattern Recognition column

The entire video was created using the stop motion animation technique, and besides looking cool, I can definitely detect a political message that underpins this short-film. Anyone else with me on that one?

Earlier today, Internet researcher and commentator, Arthur Goldstuck, presented the findings of World Wide Worx’s much anticipated “Internet Access in South Africa 2008″ study during the keynote of the Networkers at Cisco Live! conference which finished today at the Sandton Convention Centre.

Amongst the highlights were the fact that the Internet user base in South Africa has seen its highest rate of growth since 2001, increasing by 12.5% to 4,5-million in 2008.

I strongly suggest requesting a copy of the full report from World Wide Worx, but a summary of the trends and key findings are as follows:

Trend 1: There has been a 16% increase in Internet service providers
Trend 2: Hundreds of rogue and unlicensed networks are in existence
Trend 3: ADSL dominance is ending as a result of wireless broadband
Trend 4: Wireless broadband has entered the mainstream
Trend 5: Broadband culture has taken hold in SA
Trend 6: Dial-up at the end of its lifespan
Trend 7: ADSL has grown through SME installations
Trend 8: Cellphone Internet usage contributed to the Internet base
Trend 9: 12.5% jump in Internet users
Trend 10: Internet Adoption curve recovers
Trend 11: Strong growth predicted over next 5 years
Trend 12: Repeat adoption patterns
Trend 13: Experience curve flattens
Trend 14: But the experience curve will kick in again
Trend 15: Inflection point in 2013
Trend 16: More Bandwidth and increased caps!

Overall, the findings confirm what many, including myself, believe paint a bright future for South Africa’s maturing Internet population with the gap slowly closing between us and the developed world. Once SEACOM (the new fibre optic cable that will connect the East Coast of Africa to Southern Africa, Europe and Asia) goes into operation in mid-2009, the wholesale price of bandwidth is expected to come down drastically while connection speeds will far exceed anything experienced in the past.

Thanks to factors such as SEACOM and Fifa 2010, Goldstuck predicts that SA’s Internet Population will grow by 13.3% in 2009 & a whopping 17.6% in 2010!!!

It wasn’t all good news however, and Goldstuck did issue some caveats about the growing inequality gap that is emerging between South Africa’s haves and have-nots. For example, even under these new favourable conditions, it could take as long as 10 years before the previously disadvantaged are properly integrated due to the 5 year Internet experience curve. The fact remains that all the bandwidth in the world is pointless unless basic social and environmental factors are addressed such as literacy and access to reliable power.

Goldstuck also says that next year’s national elections are a key milestone and will largely determine whether the government is able to deliver on its social promises or not and whoever takes over as the next Minister of Communications will play an equally vital role in shaping the future.

Read Paul Jacobson’s post for more on this topic.

Follow the Networkers at Cisco Live! conference on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook or check out their very funky social media press release.

UPDATE: An edited version of Goldstuck’s presentation was uploaded on YouTube (watch below):

You can listen to the show below (approximately 7 mins):

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) recently made a grandiose announcement regarding the relaunch of their SABC News portal, which many industry commentators have called out over the years for being a wasted opportunity since the SABC has access to vast amounts of staff, local news and multimedia content – our very own CNN BBC.

Rather unsurprisingly, the angle of the great relaunch revolves around social media and Web 2.0, as stated in the Biz Community press release:

According to Sandison, the Web 2.0 features of the new site are expected to be its trump card. “Users will be able to customise a news homepage that reflects their interests, download or subscribe to our Podcasts and upload their own footage to the ‘Caught on Camera’ section.

Not entirely novel, but full marks for attempting to get with the times. Sadly, the site is really let down by the actual execution of this strategy which gives the impression that all these so-called ‘bells and whistles’ were a complete afterthought rather than a deliberate attempt at engaging visitors and branching out to a more savvy audience.

For example, multimedia content is relegated to an unattractive module below the page fold and, besides the pictures of the day, simply displays the latest audio and video bulletins in bullet point format. My biggest gripe however, is the fact that they chose to use RealNetworks (they still going? there’s hope for Netscape yet!) as their only encoding format instead of something with more market share such as Flash or Windows Media. I don’t have RealPlayer or its associated browser plug-ins installed and, like most other people, couldn’t be bothered to go to all this effort for the one website I’ve come across lately that insists on using it.

Yet another pearler from the press release:

This [Web 2.0 features] will be enhanced in the second phase of the site development, when users can visit the mobi portal to receive news headlines and traffic and weather reports on their mobile phones.

Any publisher that is serious about building a digital brand and making revenue in Africa should know that mobile is an essential channel with far greater reach than the desktop web and should never be considered a “phase 2″. One could pose the question to SABC – why didn’t they launch a proper news mobi portal first before redesigning their website?

There’s no doubt that the new site features vast improvements over the old one and might in fact see some growth in traffic, but the cluttered design and the fact that there was No Breaking News (sic) when I checked in this morning leads me to believe that they still have a very long way to go if they are serious about becoming a competitor in this ultra competitive market.

Ok, might as well come clean!!! Alison Carroll, AKA Lara Croft, was recently in South Africa to promote the forthcoming Tomb Raider: Underworld, the latest game in the Tomb Raider franchise, and decided to pop in to the Avusa offices for a bit of a photo shoot (perks of the job).

Some might say that there is a slight height difference and an uncanny resemblance to a scene out of the Lord of the Rings but I’ll let you be the judge:

I truly believe that it one of the most beautiful and diverse regions in Southern Africa and it’s surprisingly underrated as a tourist destination, even amongst many South Africans.

View Larger Map

I therefore am very supportive of a new online initiative called Dispatch@venture launched by the Dispatch Online (a sister publication of the Times Online), which has sent a team of its journalists trekking around the Eastern Cape, armed with hi-tec gadgets and luxury cars, in order to promote and market the province and uncover its untold stories.

Dispatch Online Editor, Andrew Trench, describes the project best:

Our teams are blogging from the road, producing video, pictures, audio etc and gathering comprehensive local information about the places they visit which we are building into a permanent collection of travel information about the Eastern Cape. On our 6000km journey – supported with a R200 000 cash sponsorship from Mercedes-Benz South Africa and who have also thrown in some top-of-the-range cars for us to use – we intend finding (and have already located) stories of hope and inspiration as well.

The project is similar to the Sunday Times’ Explorer project from eight years ago although ours intends to exploit the web technologies which are now available to us. As a newspaper, it is our first truly cross-platform project and the first which has web content at its forefront.

We will experiment in places with GPS-based content and have also optimised our @venture site for mobile. We are also using QR codes (as has the Times) to promote mobile use of the site.

More info on the project is available on Andrew’s blog.

It’s amazing to see a local newspaper engaging in an upliftment project like this and the timing couldn’t be better with Fifa 2010 just around the corner.

Nice work guys!

Why did Google bother with creating another web browser you might ask? “Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web”, was the response given on The Official Google Blog.

A comic strip explaining the Google Chrome project and its benefits, was “accidentally” leaked a few days early.

Chrome uses aspects of Apple’s Webkit engine, which powers Safari, as well as Mozilla Firefox.

Amongst the new features it boasts are “isolated” tabs designed to prevent browser crashes and a more powerful JavaScript V8 engine that should dramatically speed up JavaScript-heavy web applications.

A beta release for Windows is expected to be available for download later today with a Mac and Linux version following thereafter.

Whether there is space for yet another web browser in a market that is heavily dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox is questionable, but if anybody can do it I’d put my money on Google.